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Debian Weekly News - August 17th, 2004

Of interest to large-scale installations: Hewlett-Packard finally offers 24x7 support for Debian GNU/Linux with HP Extensions. In an article Chris DiBona highlighted the services offered by GNU/Linux vendors and pointed out that their repositories are miles ahead of competing proprietary commercial offerings.

Welcome to this year's 32nd issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. Of interest to large-scale installations:
Hewlett-Packard finally [1]offers 24x7 support for [2]Debian
GNU/Linux with HP Extensions. In an [3]article Chris DiBona
highlighted the services offered by GNU/Linux vendors and pointed out
that their repositories are miles ahead of competing proprietary
commercial offerings.

Investigating Sarge Security. Joey Hess [4]looked through every
[5]security advisory issued in 2004 and checked to see if the
security hole was fixed in sarge as well. Security holes not fixed yet
in sarge include those in [6]libpng, [7]libpng3, [8]php4,
[9]netkit-telnet-ssl, [10]pavuk, [11]www-sql, [12]lha, [13]log2mail,
[14]hsftp, [15]trr19, and [16]slocate. The other 1.5 years worth of
security advisories back to the release of woody would probably take
several more days to check. [17]Investigation of security advisories
from 2003 revealed that security updates for [18]tomcat4 and
[19]gtksee are missing in sarge.

Debian-Installer Review. Bruce Bayfield [20]reviewed the new
[21]debian-installer (d-i). He says "It introduces Debian's strengths
right at the start, and it goes a long way toward burying Debian's
reputation for being difficult to install." He added, that, by
installing only a minimal number of packages, d-i defaults to a
noticeably more secure system compared to most commercial
distributions. Bayfield suggests the new installer ease of use will
bring many new users to Debian.

What comes after Sarge? Osamu Aoki [22]wanted to release a new
[23]debian-reference package that explains the latest release names.
Naturally he was wondering which name testing will become once sarge
is released as Debian 3.1. Colin Watson opened the curtain and
[24]revealed that the release after sarge will be called etch.
Quickly, a discussion arose about using a different name and voting
upon the name.

Zero-Day Non-maintainer Uploads. Steve Langesek [25]said that this
close to the release of sarge, 3 days can definitely make the
difference between a package being ready in time for sarge, and not
being ready in time. Moreover, history shows us that 0-day
non-maintainer uploads (NMUs) have been very effective at bringing the
release-critical (RC) bug count down rapidly. He would therefore like
to declare open-season on RC bugs, including 0-day NMUs if appropriate
until the release of sarge.

Online Changelog Files. Andrew Pollock was [26]missing a possibility
to reach changelog files without actually installing the corresponding
packages. Therefore he has created [27]changelogs.debian.net which
contained those files. Martin Michlmayr [28]revealed that changelog
files already exist on [29]packages.debian.org. Hence, the new site
finally redirects HTTP requests to the files on packages.debian.org.

Best Practice QA Uploads. Matthew Palmer [30]started to write a QA
upload best practices document after working through quality assurance
(QA) procedures with one of his new-maintainer applicants. The
[31]second version caused some [32]disagreement on the scope of a QA
upload, though.

Synchronising Skolelinux with Sarge. Petter Reinholdtsen posted a
[33]list of packages that the [34]Skolelinux people should push into
Debian in order to get Debian synchronised with Skolelinux. He and
Joey Hess are [35]worried that it may already be too late to get new
packages into Debian in time for the release of sarge.

Which KDE Version in Sarge? Co-release-manager Steve Langasek
[36]complained about a last minute upload of a number of packages from
KDE 3.3 to unstable. Since he considers it undesirable to have a mix
of different versions and impossible to get all of KDE 3.3 into sarge
on schedule for the release, he concluded that KDE in sarge will not
be updated from unstable and fixes to KDE related packages should be
submitted to testing-proposed-updates. Chris Cheney [37]objected to
Steve's assessment, while [38]Ben Burton and [39]René Engelhard
concurred. René also [40]noticed that [41]kdelibs-data again caused
file conflicts with [42]openoffice.org-mimelnk.

Cdrecord on the Way to non-free. Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo [43]noticed
that Jörg Schilling has added a non-modification clause to a file
within the [44]cdrecord distribution which renders the package
non-free since this is in direct [45]conflict with the [46]GNU General
Public License.

New LaTeX Project Public License, Version 1.3. Branden Robinson
[47]reported that a new version of the [48]LaTeX Project Public
License (LPPL) has been published, taking most of debian-legal
contributor's comments into account, and the LaTeX project also
intends to see OSI Certification. It seems to be compliant with the
[49]Debian Free Software Guidelines. Hilmar Preusse [50]added that the
teTeX packages in Debian are released under LPPL 1.2.

Freeness of the Qt Public License. Martin Krafft [51]wondered if the
new [52]Qt Public License (QPL) is considered DFSG-free, since it is
[53]OSI approved and because it was [54]requested to remove [55]libcwd
from main. Andrew Suffield [56]asserted that choice-of-venue clauses
are decidedly non-free.

Bug Squashing Week. Frank Lichtenheld [57]announced that this entire
week has been declared the bug squashing week. He will be around in
#debian-bugs on both irc.debian.org and irc.oftc.net over the whole
period of time (except for system recreation intervals) trying to keep
the party going and appeal to all people to participate on it. He will
be also joining the real life bug squashing party at the TU Darmstadt,
Germany.

New SPI Officers. John Goerzen [58]announced that [59]Software in the
Public Interest, Inc. (SPI) has [60]selected the [61]officers during
its annual meeting. They are: President: John Goerzen, Vice President:
Benjamin Mako Hill, Treasurer: Jimmy Kaplowitz, and Secretary: David
Graham. He also announced the [62]annual report for SPI and encouraged
Debian developers to get involved with this organisation.

Debian Packages introduced last Week. Every day, a different Debian
package is [110]featured from the testing distribution. If you know
about an obscure package you think others should also know about, send
it to [111]Andrew Sweger. Debian package a day introduced the
following packages last week.

Orphaned Packages. 5 packages were orphaned this week and require a
new maintainer. This makes a total of 168 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free
Software community. Please see the [115]WNPP pages for the full list,
and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA: if you
plan to take over a package.

Want to continue reading DWN? Please help us create this newsletter.
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